Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Soviets Sought to Force Left-Handed People to Be Right-Handed

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 5 – One of the clearest
examples of the fundamental “idiotism of the Soviet system,” Maksim Mirovich
says, was its decades’ long effort to force left-handed people to be
right-handed, a program that lasted from the 1920s until 1986, was seldom
successful, and had many negative consequences for those who were left-handed
by nature.

The efforts used in Soviet schools
and in Soviet households as a result of official directive or encouragement
ranged from moral suasion which often left left-handed people with the sense of
being outcasts to physical constraints which led to sleeplessness, stuttering
and nervous ticks, the commentator says (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5B161FB98D16F).

Hostility to left-handed people
exists in many cultures, but the basis for it varies widely. In the Soviet
Union, it rested primarily in the view that no one should exist who was in any
way different from the masses. But it also reflected military concerns: Soviet
weapons ejected shells to the left, no problem for right-handed people but
could be for left-handed ones.

Soviet scholars, following Western
ones, routinely showed that true left-handedness was an innate quality that
could not be completely overcome; but they were ignored by officials who
continued to pursue a homogenizing agenda.Finally, in the first year of Gorbachev’s rule, the anti-lefty effort
was dropped, although the prejudice against this quality likely remains.